Author: Naipaul, V. S.
Paperback
Vintage Books USA
ISBN: 0375708359

An Area of Darkness is V. S. Naipaul's profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. Passionate -- even prophetic -- this is travel writing and cultural analysis at its highest level.